Wednesday, August 2, 2017

stamp people (the sparkler)

In Japan, August is the month for school vacation, cool cotton kimonos called yukata, hand-held flat fans called uchiwa, honoring deceased ancestors, telling ghost stories, and community festivals with folk dancing and firework displays.

I've always been partial to the hand-held sparklers called senkou-hanabi (incense sparklers) myself. When the sparkling ball at the end of the thin stick dulls and plops to the ground, we are reminded that summer (like life) does not last forever. Which is the sort of bitter-sweet, melancholic symbolism that delights the Japanese soul.

The writing on this Stamp People collage is in Japanese, and translates to: "When You Sparkle The World Sparkles With You." You
can see that I tried to hide the hands on the postage stamp by adding
hair. But it doesn't quite work. Cute stamp though, isn't it?

A Beginner's Guide to Etegami

what is etegami?

Etegami (e= "picture"; tegami= "letter/message") are simple drawings accompanied by a few apt words. They are usually done on postcards so that they can be easily mailed off to one's friends. Though etegami has few hard-and-fast rules, traditional tools and materials include writing brushes, sumi ink, blocks of water-soluble, mineral-based pigments called gansai, and washi postcards that have varying degrees of "bleed." They often depict some ordinary item from everyday life, especially items that bring a particular season to mind.